Heat waves are no longer statistical outliers but expressions of a shifted climatic baseline. Heat waves are rising because three forces[1] now work together: a warmer planet, “stuck” weather, and heat-amplifying land surfaces. Greenhouse gases lift average temperatures and subtly shift the jet stream, making slow-moving high-pressure systems more likely, so hot, dry air lingers over the same place for days or weeks. On the ground, dry soils cut off natural cooling from evaporation, land-use changes remove shade, and cities built of concrete and asphalt soak up heat by day and release it at night, keeping evenings unusually warm. The result is more frequent, longer, and deadlier heat waves, especially in urban areas. This creates a “compound” heatwave: scorching, humid days, shown by high wet-bulb readings (a measure that combines heat and humidity), are followed by unusually warm nights, leaving people and essential services with little relief or time to cool down and recover.[2] Attribution studies over recent European summers indicate that a large share of excess mortality is causally linked to human-induced warming and is concentrated among older adults, a demographic trend that will intensify as populations age.[3] In short, extreme heat now reflects structural properties of the climate system and of the built environment, not transient “bad weather.”
The cascade effect: How heat strains infrastructure and vital systems
Extreme heat neither displaces nor trivialises higher-profile threats. It amplifies them. It undermines public safety while straining electricity and water systems, transport networks, and health care at the same time over several days.[4] For defence and interior ministries, this translates into tighter training schedules and a rise in heat illness among personnel. It also drives more frequent humanitarian-assistance and disaster-relief deployments, which erode core missions unless funding and doctrine keep pace. Recent episodes illustrate the point: record power demand and rolling outages during heatwaves in parts of South Asia, rail buckling in the United Kingdom and continental Europe, aircraft facing weight restrictions during hot spells in cities such as Phoenix and Madrid and large-scale military support to wildfire evacuations in Canada and Greece.[5]
Recent events across regions illustrate how extreme heat can precipitate security-relevant outcomes and which populations bear the burden. In Europe’s 2022 and 2025 summers, excess-mortality analyses documented tens of thousands of deaths, with older adults disproportionately affected and clear correlations with elevated night-time temperatures, highlighting the role of housing quality and social isolation.[6] In the United States, extreme heat compounds infrastructure risk: Hurricane damage to bases in Florida, notably Tyndall Air Force Base, devastated by Category-5 Hurricane Michael in 2018 and now undergoing a roughly US$5 billion “base-of-the-future” rebuild[7], and flooding in Nebraska at the Offutt Air Force Base, where the 2019 Missouri River floods inundated about one-third of the installation and required more than US$700 million in repairs, triggered multi-year rebuilds and budget shifts. Heat links to these extremes by supercharging oceans and the atmosphere: hotter seas and moister air feed stronger hurricanes and heavier downpours, while prolonged heat dries soils, making flash flooding more likely when storms finally arrive. At the same time, training days with high Wet-Bulb Globe Temperature at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island and Army posts such as Fort Jackson and Fort Moore prompted stepped-up heat-illness monitoring and more cancellations, including “black-flag” pauses or scrubs of outdoor PT, ruck marches, and field exercises, underscoring the trade-offs for readiness.[8] In South and East Asia, protracted hot spells have driven record electricity demand, rolling blackouts, and industrial slowdowns, with disproportionate impacts on outdoor workers and low-income households lacking access to reliable cooling. Across these cases, the most affected populations are advanced in age, have pre-existing conditions or occupational exposure, live in places that don’t have adequate cooling, or have limited access to information and services.
From environmental hazard to security risk
Heat becomes a security concern when it degrades the performance of critical systems and institutions.[9] The first pathway is health security: acute heat stresses the cardiovascular, renal, and respiratory systems, elevates emergency call volumes, and displaces routine care, thereby increasing all-cause mortality. The second pathway runs through infrastructure: as heat swells demand on the grid while sapping system efficiency, the strain cascades through transport and aviation and turns a meteorological extreme into concrete operational breakdowns. Where potable water depends on energy-intensive desalination the water–energy–heat nexus can transform a thermal anomaly into a cascading emergency as power stress jeopardizes water output precisely when medical and household demand peaks. The third pathway is economic: reduced labour productivity, particularly in outdoor and logistics-intensive sectors, depresses output and revenues during the very periods that require fiscal outlays for response.[10] Finally, these strains accumulate into political risk whenever perceived inequalities in access to cooling, water, or medical care erode trust, produce localised unrest, or invite opportunistic disinformation.[11]
Heat security has been ignored for because data invisibility in that heat seldom appears on death certificates, and its signal emerges only through excess-mortality analysis after the fact. Daytime maxima rather than humidity-weighted indices and nocturnal thresholds were used to measure heat, which led to delayed action. There is also an agenda bias with intentional threats such as terrorism, war, or major cyberattacks command attention, while chronic, seasonal, system-wide risks like extreme heat are overlooked. The result has been under-investment in prevention relative to response, despite growing evidence that expected losses from heat, measured in mortality, foregone output, and infrastructure damage, are comparable to, or exceed, those from other climate hazards in high-income settings.[12]
More than a seasonal nuisance: Governing for heat
The generic mechanisms above are intensified in rapidly urbanising Middle Eastern cities. High urban density, extensive paved and built surfaces (i.e., hardscapes such as concrete and asphalt), and car-dependent mobility keep night-time low temperatures (often called nocturnal minima) unusually high and these warmer nights are the strongest predictor of heat deaths. Demographic patterns further raise exposure: a growing share of residents are older, particularly those aged 65+, with 75+ the most affected due to chronic conditions and medications that impair the body’s ability to cool. Mass gatherings add a distinctive operational challenge.[13] Over several days of extreme heat in 2024, temperatures in Mecca neared 50–52 °C and more than 1,300 pilgrims died. Saudi authorities later noted that the vast majority were unregistered and lacked access to air-conditioned transport and cooling tents. This combination of climatic extremes, crowd density, and uneven service access turned into a mass-casualty event.[14] More broadly, Gulf urban resilience hinges on uninterrupted electricity for cooling and on desalination for potable water. Both are stressed under heat, creating a structural incentive to protect critical loads and to design for graceful degradation rather than brittle failure.[15]
Where Gulf and wider MENA governments have moved fastest, they have treated heat as a cross-sector mission rather than a meteorological footnote. Many measures are already implemented in the region. Heat-health action plans should trigger clear municipal responses via targeted outreach and SMS alerts to those most at risk, along with easy access to cooling centers and cooled transit stops. Cities have added shaded walking routes in busy areas and upgrade district-cooling networks, while safeguarding power for hospitals, desalination plants, and emergency communications.[16] At work, enforceable rules during peak heat such as regular rest cycles for manual workers, shaded breaks, hydration requirements, and flexible scheduling help keep people safe. The task now is less about inventing new tools and more about tightening and integrating what already exists. Laws should trigger action based on compound, humidity-sensitive heat indices and nighttime thresholds, not just daytime highs. Authorities should also standardize how agencies work together at mass gatherings by using shared triage codes and real-time crowd-heat mapping, so command is truly interoperable. Health surveillance needs to track heat-related deaths and illness in near-real time with public updates, and every activation should end with an after-action review that feeds directly into the next season’s plan.[17] Because the water–energy–heat nexus is structural, protecting critical loads through islandable microgrids and thermal storage, and dimensioning emergency water stocks to realistic event durations, should be treated as core security infrastructure rather than discretionary upgrades.
Conclusion
Extreme heat has crossed the threshold from environmental concern to security risk. Its drivers are well understood and its impacts are measurable. Policy responses in the GCC and elsewhere already demonstrate that substantial risk reduction is achievable with today’s tools when heat is treated as an operational campaign rather than a seasonal inconvenience. In a hotter century, countries that normalise this discipline will sustain essential services and maintain public trust during the weeks when it matters most.
Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed in the INSIGHTS publication series are those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Rabdan Security & Defense Institute, its affiliated organizations, or any government entity. The content published is intended for informational purposes and reflects the personal perspectives of the authors on various security and defence-related topics.
[1] WHO (2024) Heat and health. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-heat-and-health
[2] Reuters, ‘How Concrete, Asphalt and Urban Heat Increase Misery of Heat Waves’, July 31, 2023, https://www.voanews.com/a/how-concrete-asphalt-and-urban-heat-increase-misery-of-heat-waves-/7205299.html
[3] Wu X et al, ‘Future heat-related mortality in Europe driven by compound day-night heatwaves and demographic shifts’, Nat Commun, 2025 Aug 11;16(1):7420, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12339726/
[4] L Brogno et al, ‘Review on heatwaves: a risk perspective’, Environmental Research Letters, May 29, 2025, Volume 20, Number 6, https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/add178
[5] Knudsen, Jacob ‘Unprecedented heat wave disrupts United Kingdom air and rail traffic’, 18 July, 2022, AXIOS, https://www.axios.com/2022/07/18/heat-wave-disrupts-uk-rail-traffic
[6] EMBER (2025) Heat and power: Impacts of the 2025 heatwave in Europe. https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2025/07/Ember-Report-Heat-and-Power-Impacts-of-the-2025-heatwave-in-Europe.pdf
[7] Weisberger, Marcus ‘US Air Force: We Need $5 Billion To Fix Weather-Damaged Bases’, Defense One, March 27, 2019, US Air Force: We Need $5 Billion To Fix Weather-Damaged Bases - Defense One
[8] HPRC, ‘Military heat flag conditions explained’, Military heat flag conditions explained | HPRC
[9] Trung Thanh Nguyen et al, ‘Security risks from climate change and environmental degradation: implications for sustainable land use transformation in the Global South’, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Volume 63, 2023, Security risks from climate change and environmental degradation: implications for sustainable land use transformation in the Global South - ScienceDirect
[10] Ebi KL et al, ‘Hot weather and heat extremes: health risks’, Lancet, 2021 Aug 21;398(10301):698-708, Hot weather and heat extremes: health risks - PubMed
[11] Mani, Raja ‘A scorching divide: How heatwaves expose inequality’, UNDP, June 12, 2024, A scorching divide: How heatwaves expose inequality | United Nations Development Programme
[12] World Meteorological Organization, ‘The silent killer: We need better risk governance to beat extreme heat | GP 2025’, June 11, 2025, The silent killer: We need better risk governance to beat extreme heat | GP 2025
[13] Calabrese, John, ‘From Floods to Heatwaves: Navigating the Gulf’s New Climate Reality’, Gulf International Forum (GIF), From Floods to Heatwaves: Navigating the Gulf's New Climate Reality - Gulf International Forum
[14] Aggarwal, Mithil et al, ‘Deaths during Hajj: How this year's pilgrimage turned fatal’, NBC News, June 27, 2024, Deaths during Hajj: How the pilgrimage turned fatal
[15] Salimi, Mohsen and Sami G. Al-Ghamdi, ‘Climate change impacts on critical urban infrastructure and urban resiliency strategies for the Middle East’, Sustainable Cities and Society, Volume 54, 2020, Climate change impacts on critical urban infrastructure and urban resiliency strategies for the Middle East - ScienceDirect
[16] UNDRR (2025) Facing the heat: how the Arab Region is tackling rising temperatures. February 11, 2025, https://www.undrr.org/news/facing-heat-how-arab-region-tackling-rising-temperatures
[17] Khamis, Jumana, ‘How Gulf nations are responding to the age of record-breaking extreme temperatures’, Arab News, July 19, 2023, How Gulf nations are responding to the age of record-breaking extreme temperatures | Arab News
